Scott Drummonds on Virtualization

This week EMC sponsored a worldwide event to humanize big data. I wrote about the event’s smart phone app last week. The Singapore event was run Tuesday at Red Dot Design Museum. I led press and analyst discussions on big data using interactive graphics created for the event. We have released these graphics to the public and you may enjoy playing with them.

The three figures below were generated by EMC data scientists using data from a couple of sources. In one case Twitter provided EMC access to the Twitter “firehose” for nine days: we collected every tweet in the world. We stored in a Greenplum database one billion tweets. Tableau Software contributed their expertise to turn the data into these interactive charts that you can explore.

First, an interactive graphic correlating Major League Baseball’s teams’ wins versus tweets. Boundless enthusiasm for the Yankees buoy their twitter count no matter how the team fares. An incredible season by the Nationals generates less interest than a lackluster season by the Red Sox. Also check the statistical outliers for the Astros and the Cardinals. Drill down into those results and see events and mistakes that skewed the data.

The next Tableau visual shows Singaporeans tweeting about traffic. Singaporean taxi driver complaints about traffic are endless. But I think Singapore traffic is amazing. You can only complain about local traffic if you have never seen Bangkok, Beijing, or Los Angeles.

The third graphic shows results of radiation measurements since last year’s Fukushima disaster. Concerned about fallout, armies of concerned citizens performed measurements at massive scale. You can see from this chart the red zones near the accident and the safe areas around the country.

All fifteen of our interactive graphics are available online, courtesy of Tableau Software. The visitors to our Singapore event got a kick out of the graphics and I think you will, too. If you are an aspiring data scientist you should consider visualizing your hobbyist data with Tableau. It is completely free for personal use!